Pandemic Diary

This
is my stepfather's true story and also
contains a warning that the Spanish flu lasted the better part of 2
years.

Clifford
Guy Wessman, unlovingly remembered as my Wicked Stepfather, was
inducted into the army shortly after the United States finally
entered World War I, the War to End all Wars. He was twenty-five,
married but childless. When he left Alta, Iowa in July of 1918 he
had no idea -. had never even heard a rumor - that the Spanish
Influenza had a six-months start on becoming a global pandemic.

I
hated him with the passions put to use in my current griefs, and with
my childhood’s angst (apologies to Elizabeth Barrett
Browning!), but that’s a story for another time. This is about
the war stories he would tell over the New Year’s Tom and
Jerrys with the aunts and uncles gathered around. Mostly lies, of
course. Even in my early teens, 1950 or so, I could realize the
falsity of his stories, and wonder why they listened so politely.

“Just
before I was to go to the front in France,” he would grin, “I
got the flu. I could hear the big guns booming up there. Aha! I
thought, I won’t get killed after all. But then, my fever went
to 105 and they thought I was going to die.”

He’d
stop for effect, take a drink from his cup, often wipe the brow
beneath his thin, graying hair for effect. “Whew! That was
HOT,” he always said.

On
he went, much the same story each time, about the makeshift tent
hospital that housed all the flu victims, and how four orderlies came
in the evening to carry out those who had died during the day. “I
heard them at my bed, as God is my witness,” he would swear and
I would cringe. “One guy said ‘this one will be gone
before morning, anyway’ and they wired a tag on my big toe and
stretchered me to another tent. I could barely see through the haze
of the fever, but was pretty sure all them 3-tiered bunks was full of
dead soldiers.”

He’d
stop, then, and pay close attention to the liquid in his cup. Soon
someone would say “C’mon, Wes. What happened?”
That was his cue to finish the story.

“I
didn’t die!” His laugh shook his big Swede frame from
the inside, but emerged as only a sly giggle. “I didn’t
die! When I woke up, my fever had broke and my curly hair was
straight as a string!”

Yeah,
right.

*****

Clifford
Guy Wessman passed away in 1954 at the age of 61. When my mother was
ailing, 20 years later, she gave me his World War I diary. “Please
read it,” she begged as she handed me the thin leather volume. “Get to
know him better.”

His
crabbed, right-handed writing was impossible to decipher in places
(he’d had his left hand tied behind him in his early school
days,) but I managed to wade through the entries made from 7/25/1918
to 4/6/1919. They chronicled in minute detail his trip to his first
camp, his sea voyage to France, and most of the meals he was served
anywhere. He recorded the serial number of the 30-30 Eddystone rifle
issued to him in training, and made note of the Springfield rifle,
steel helmet and gas mask he was given on September 23, 1918 in
France, as well as the extra good supper that evening.

There
is a gap in the daily record, from November 6 to November 28. It
takes up again with this matter of fact line: Went
to the hospital with influenza Nov. 8th,,.then
tells of days of recuperation, of being in the kitchen (Black Jack
Pershing passed beneath Wes’s kitchen window and got a half
line in the diary,) of cake and ice cream there on his 26th
birthday in January. He was finally shipped to the U.S. to
recuperate in New York City; the old Siegel Cooper seven-story
department store building had been transformed into an army hospital.
The rest of the diary chronicles his time there, a Broadway play,
and many meals. Finally discharged as well enough to return home, he
got back to Iowa on Sunday, April 6th,
1919.

The
diary was a repository for some loose items; a French postcard (no,
not a naughty one!) a tissue-thin letter from his wife, and a
pencil-filled hospital form #55-J of daily temperatures, which began
at 102.6 and peaked at (yes,) 105. Further disrupting my childhood
suspicion of his story was a picture of him with two buddies, his mop
of curly hair distinctive.

Never
once, in his diary or in his stories, did my stepfather show that he
knew the Spanish Flu was a pandemic that killed thirty or forty
million
people on the planet in its nearly two-year reign of terror, or that
over 45 thousand U.S. troops perished with it, 15 thousand in France
in 1918. I don’t remember his ever indicating that his
so-called recovery was anything like a miracle. And yet ….

The
last loose item from the diary was a manila-colored tag about 2 x 4
inches, with illegible pencil writing for the most part. Legible is
the date, and Regt. 304th. There is no form number on
this battered memento, which surely
encircled someone’s big toe with the two fine wires still
attached.